It’s awful business practice to slate your staff to your customers – so why is the already-beleaguered Southern Railway doing exactly that? The short version is, it’s part of a fluffy Blair-era private-public partnership company whose business model is obsolete in today’s nastier world – it just hasn’t realised it yet.

On top of the problems with its service that has led to cuts and delays all year, the firm is also the target of a strike by RMT union conductors this week. On social media, Southern decided this would be a good response:

You can click through the tweet to read the reactions, but suffice it to say that they were less than positive. If you're in a customer-facing industry and you bash your staff to your customers, whatever the context, you end up looking at best incompetent, and at worst treacherous and incompetent. So what's going on?

I wrote about the background to this dispute here in August, and not much has changed. Quick précis: the model of train operation where the guard is in charge of the doors and sounds the starting bell (as distinct from being a person on board who makes sure passengers are safe, sells tickets and helps evacuate in an emergency) has been obsolete for decades. Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), which operates Southern-branded trains, already has driver-only operation on some of its routes; it's trying to introduce it on more; and RMT conductors are going on strike because they disapprove, citing a risk to passenger safety.

The safety claims don't have any real merit. Swathes of London’s network are already driver-operated, as is the Underground; these have no difference in safety record from areas where guards operate the doors. The RMT know this, and are pretending a dispute which is about protecting their members' jobs and conditions, is about protecting the public.

Even though rail is a very safe transport mode, and UK railways among the world’s safest, the fear of a train crash haunts public imaginations (not helped by incidents in countries that use technology that was removed decades ago in Britain, such as Italy and the USA). We’re bad at assessing risk versus cost, especially when rare failures are horrific. Many people are unhappy about unions standing up for their members’ pay and conditions – so public safety is an understandable path for the RMT to tread despite the total absence of evidence.

That doesn't explain Southern's response, though. As a company in a heavily unionised industry, you can be a hard-arsed union basher like Rupert Murdoch in the 1980s, or you can work with the union and be liked by your customers. You can’t do both, and saying “poor me” when you've allowed a strike to happen doesn't cut it.

To understand why the response has gone wrong, you need to understand the status of the GTR business. Although it's operated under contract by a private company, it doesn’t make commercial decisions and keep fare-box profits like Virgin Trains. GTR is paid a fixed operating fee by the Department for Transport (DfT), and it does exactly what the department tells it to do.

Rail frontline staff costs have risen (and strikes fallen) in the 20 years since privatisation. That’s because commercial franchisees are incentivised to meet staff demands rather than lose revenues and attract penalty payments. This isn’t the biggest driver of increased costs on the railway, but it is still a significant one.

The new minister in charge at the DfT is far-right attack dog Chris Grayling. At the time GTR's contract was signed, the minister was Patrick McLoughlin, an ex-miner who worked throughout the 1984 strike. Their attitude to staff costs and the merits of unions is, well, not hard to guess.

So, how does this fit with the Southern tweet?

GTR signed up to do what they were told, and they're being told to be bastards. There are outsourcing companies who specialise in this job; most obviously G4S and Serco, who've seldom met a jail or a migrant detention centre they wouldn't take on for a fee.

But that isn't how UK train operating companies have worked since privatisation – they're rooted in Richard Branson and Tony Blair's world of post-ideology capitalism, where everyone smiles and there's enough money going around to grease everyone’s palms. Southern was run as a traditional franchise by Govia before GTR was created, so its corporate culture (white collar types who're obliged to believe in brand values, rather than skilled union types who just drive trains) reflects that world.

In this context, Southern's tweet – some marketers not understanding why the RMT has to be so horrible, when they're only doing what the government has told them to do – sums up the change in era. The Blairite fluffy model is dead, replaced by savage cuts and Thatcherite union battles.

The government knows we're in a newer, nastier era. The RMT knows it, and the people who responded angrily to Southern's tweet know it. The folks at Southern probably need to learn it, quick-sharp.

Last week, the Guardian revealed that at least a quarter of councils have halted the roll-out of electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure with no plans to resume its installation. This is a fully charged battery-worth of miles short of ideal, given the ambitious decarbonisation targets to which the UK is rightly working.

It’s even more startling given the current focus on inclusive growth, for the switch to EVs is an economic advancement, on an individual and societal level. Decarbonisation will free up resources and push growth, but the way in which we go about it will have impacts for generations after the task is complete.

If there is one lesson that has been not so much taught to us as screamed at us by recent history, it is that the market does not deliver inclusivity by itself. Left to its own devices, the market tends to leave people behind. And people left behind make all kinds of rational decisions, in polling stations and elsewhere that can seem wholly irrational to those charged with keeping pace – as illuminted in Jeremy Harding’s despatch from the ‘periphery’ which has incubated France’s ‘gilet jaunes’ in the London Review of Books.

But what in the name of Nikola Tesla has any of this to do with charging stations? The Localis argument is simple: local government must work strategically with energy network providers to ensure that EV charging stations are rolled out equally across areas, to ensure deprived areas do not face further disadvantage in the switch to EVs. To do so, Ofgem must first devolve certain regulations around energy supply and management to our combined authorities and city regions.

Although it might make sense now to invest in wealthier areas where EVs are already present, if there isn’t infrastructure in place ahead of demand elsewhere, then we risk a ‘tale of two cities’, where decarbonisation is two-speed and its benefits are two-tier.

The Department for Transport (DfT) announced on Monday that urban mobility will be an issue for overarching and intelligent strategy moving forward. The issue of fairness must be central to any such strategy, lest it just become a case of more nice things in nice places and a further widening of the social gap in our cities.

This is where the local state comes in. To achieve clean transport across a city, more is needed than just the installation of charging points. Collaboration must be coordinated between many of a place’s moving parts.

The DfT announcement makes much of open data, which is undoubtedly crucial to realising the goal of a smart city. This awareness of digital infrastructure must also be matched by upgrades to physical infrastructure, if we are going to realise the full network effects of an integrated city, and as we argue in detail in our recent report, it is here that inclusivity can be stitched firmly into the fabric.

Councils know the ins and outs of deprivation within their boundaries and are uniquely placed to bring together stakeholders from across sectors to devise and implement inclusive transport strategy. In the switch to EVs and in the wider Future of Mobility, they must stay a major player in the game.

As transport minister and biographer of Edmund Burke, Jesse Norman has been keen to stress the founding Conservative philosopher’s belief in the duty of those living in the present to respect the traditions of the past and keep this legacy alive for their own successors.

If this is to be a Burkean moment in making the leap to the transformative transport systems of the future, Mr Norman should give due attention to local government’s role as “little platoons” in this process: as committed agents of change whose civic responsibility and knowledge of place can make this mobility revolution happen.

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